View full sizeSEAN SIMMERS, The Patriot-NewsRev. Paul Schenck lights the candles at Our Lady of Blessed Sacrament prior to a service.

When the Rev. Paul Schenck presides over Sunday Mass for the first time this morning at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament in Harrisburg, his wife, Becky, and several of their eight children will be in attendance.

In a church governed by strict dictates of celibacy for priests and high-ranking clergy, Schenck — a father of eight married 33 years — is not so much the anomaly as the welcomed exception. He became a priest through a special dispensation decreed 30 years ago by Pope John Paul II.

In 1980, to welcome Anglican ministers into the Catholic fold, Pope John Paul instituted the Pastoral Provision, which, in this country was geared toward Episcopalian ministers. The requests undergo scrutiny at the local diocese level, and eventually wind through the Vatican hierarchy to the pope, who reviews each application and has final saying.

In the case of Schenck, a nearly three-decade service to the Catholic Church was rewarded last year when Pope Benedict XVI approved his dispensation. Schenck, 51, was ordained last month at St. Joseph’s Church in York — his entire family in attendance.

“Praise God,” said Schenck of his assistant pastor assignment. “Being the senior pastor at a parish church is a lot of responsibility. But I’m very glad to be here.”

At the age of 16, he seized his mother’s promise that when he and his siblings came of age, they could choose their religion. He traded his Jewish faith for the teachings of Christianity and set his sights on becoming an Episcopal minister. His twin brother, Robert, became a Methodist minister.

Twenty some years later, while traveling in Jerusalem and in the presence of the Pope, his desire to enter the Catholic Church was overwhelming.

“I could no longer resist,” he said

Schenck was baptized Catholic in 2004.

In 1987, Schenck, an Episcopal minister just outside Buffalo, was approached by a young and distraught couple from the congregation. The couple handed him three medical bags containing the remains of three aborted fetuses, which they had taken from a nearby clinic.

That encounter catapulted Schenck into an unrelenting determination to fight abortion rights.

He helped found Operation Rescue, the movement that put hundreds of sidewalk counselors outside abortion clinics in this country, and founded the National Pro-Life Action Center in Washington, D.C., which he still chairs.

In the past two decades, Schenck, now the director of the office of Respect for Life Activities of the Harrisburg Diocese, has been arrested and jailed multiple times, mostly for trespassing.

“Of all the reasons to be arrested, that’s a pretty good one,” said his 21-year-old daughter Alizah, who has visited him in prison several times.

In 1997, Schenck challenged a federal district court injunction that restricted anti abortion sidewalk counselors from approaching men and women entering clinics.

Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western New York reached the United States Supreme Court. In an 8-1 ruling in his favor, the court ruled that the imposed buffer zones were an unconstitutional violation of freedom of speech.

“It felt good,” Becky said. “But there was still so much work to be done.”

In many ways, life has changed little for the Schenck family in the past month.

“He has been a pastor for as long as I’ve been alive,” said Alizah, who will attend St. Thomas Moore College in New Hampshire.

While it sounds revolutionary, the concept of married Catholic priests has been part of church history. The Catholic Ukrainian and Ruthenian Rites have long permitted priests to marry.

“I think a big difference now and then is that most (Anglican ministers) ordained in the 19th century were men who were not married,” said Monsignor Stuart Swetland of Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsville, Md.

Since the inception of the Pastoral Provision, the Catholic Church in the United States has ordained between 75 to 100 priests, he said.

Schenck calls the vocation of his celibate peers heroic.

“I’m like the refurbished phone,” he said. “ You are very excited to take it home then you open it up and read that it has been refurbished. If it works like a new one, it’s as good as a new one. But these men have heroically laid aside what every Christian man has the right to be — a husband and father.”

Away from the rectory, the diocese and the alter, Schenck will continue to be a father.

“Family life has been a source of endless joy, a lot of trials and burden but endless joy,” Schenck said.

He said these days he is cutting back on how much preaching he does to them.

“But I take the trash out,” he said. “My wife mows the lawn because she loves the tractor. This past month I fixed the toilet and the car.”

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